On 6 April 2013 23:48, tim Rowledge tim@rowledge.org wrote:
On 06-04-2013, at 3:13 PM, Frank Shearar frank.shearar@gmail.com wrote:
What I find interesting in Phexample, and Gilad Bracha's "debug mode is the only mode", and Lightable, and Bret Victor's demo, is... it's all old news!
Some of us dinosaurs have been using the term 'debugging into existence' for thirty years and I'm not at all sure it was original then. I'm more the obsessive-compulsive sort that likes to stare into the depths of the Matmos until we have the basics - or even full scope - of the answer in our heads before rising from our meditation mats, ritually washing ourselves in the blood of java-weenies, and sinking a few lattés on the way to the keyboard-shrine.
Sure. REPL/Workspace development. Or to be all new-fangled, starting with a failing test that you debug into existence. (My own preference.)
But there is still a qualitative difference between being able to evaluate the expressions in your Workspace whenever you want, and having them always evaluated automatically. (*) I didn't believe there would be, but Lightable surprised me even though I "knew" what to expect. Having said that, there isn't a Lightable mode for emacs, so I haven't discovered the effect this might have on my programming flow. (Lightable is, for the moment, only for Clojure, and I do all my Clojure work in emacs because, well, why would you use anything else?)
frank
(*) I'll ignore the obvious problems of side effects: deleting things on the file system, launching missiles and the like. In Smalltalk that's a very, very big problem to solve (because of how baked in side effects are in the standard libraries, and the code built on the standard libraries), and we don't have an type/effect system to help us identify same.